


454. chasing time

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [166]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-09-08 07:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8836267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: —help,” Sarah says, but by the time the word leaves her mouth she realizes she is already back. It’s 2016. She and Helena are the exact same age.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: abuse]

—help,” Sarah says, but by the time the word leaves her mouth she realizes she is already back. It’s 2016 and the presence of Helena is a comforting weight across the room; Sarah can feel the humming settling in her chest, everything clicking into place. It’s 2016 and she’s fine. It’s 2016 and she and Helena are the exact same age.

“Hello,” Helena says, looking up from her mug of hot chocolate and blinking at Sarah. “You were at S’s house, I think.”

“Yeah, five days ago,” Sarah says. She stands up and goes to the kitchen, opens a cabinet. “All you’ve got is cereal,” she says. “You gotta eat somethin’ besides marshmallows or you’ll die, meathead.”

“When were you?” Helena says, blithely ignoring the possibility of death by marshmallow.

“The nineties,” Sarah says.

“It was fine, found a place to kip.”

“For five days.”

“Yeah.” She’s found a sandwich in the back of the fridge; she holds it up. “Oi, how old is this?”

Helena doesn’t answer; she is probably shrugging. Sarah gambles. She’s _starving_. The cling wrap crinkles as she shoves half the sandwich in her mouth, crosses the room and slings herself onto the couch next to Helena. “God, I’m tired,” she says through a mouthful of sandwich.

“You can sleep,” Helena says. “S might be scared though.”

“You tell her,” Sarah says – slurs, more like. She’s already falling asleep. The very last thing she hears is her sister saying: “Okay.”

\--

Sarah lost her grip on time at age eight. It scared the shit out of her the first time – she’d blinked far into the future, thirty or forty years, and had ended up in the apartment of a stranger. The stranger had sat her down and given her a mug of hot chocolate and explained the situation to her, something like this:

The egg that was supposed to be Sarah split in two inside the womb, and sometime after that Sarah’s place in time got – loose. Nobody really knows why, but one half of that egg got the ship and the rest of it got the anchor. Which is to say: Sarah can hop all over the place in time, but she’ll always find Helena whenever she goes.

Some whens are better than others, though. Helena didn’t have a very happy childhood – she stayed stable in time, but that doesn’t mean her life was any better than Sarah’s. Sometimes it’s young Sarah and young Helena sitting shivering in a basement, or Helena hiding Sarah under a table or under a bed or out a window while the sound of footsteps bangs heavy on the stairs outside. But on the good times Helena is grown enough to recognize her, and give her cocoa, and ask her how her day has been, and Sarah is fine.

\--

When Sarah wakes up, Helena has thrown a blanket over her. Somewhere a clock is ticking, which makes Sarah want to laugh. She lies there for a moment under the blanket and lets her eyes stay closed. The two of them don’t really talk about when Sarah goes _back_ , when Helena is nothing more than a collection of bruises and skinnybones and huge eyes. This time Sarah popped in during a one-sided argument between Helena and Tomas and she had to run, even though she didn’t want to. She spent five days in a city she doesn’t know, filled with a language she doesn’t speak, and somewhere behind her her sister was in pain, and she didn’t fix it, and now she’s back and there’s nothing she can do. It fucks with her sometimes. She and Helena have talked about it before: Sarah feels like there’s something she can do, and Helena feels like there isn’t. Arguments about fate, or some shit that’s too lofty for Sarah to understand.

Something is nudging her in the shoulder. Sarah cracks her eyes open and blinks at the bowl of sugary, marshmallow-filled cereal that’s just appeared in front of her nose. She makes a noise that is something like _blrargl._

“Most important meal,” Helena says.

“I’m not awake,” Sarah groans, and buries her face back in the blankets. Helena makes a snort of disbelief and very carefully balances the cereal bowl on top of Sarah’s head before her footsteps putter away.

Sarah sighs to herself. Then she reaches up, grabs the cereal bowl off her head, and sits up to eat it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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